


Teen Wolf, Season 3, Episode 6, Motel California

by TheSomewhatRamblingReviewer



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Analysis, Episode Review, Episode: s03e06 Motel California, Meta, Nonfiction, Season/Series 03, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-17
Updated: 2018-10-17
Packaged: 2019-08-03 10:25:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16324463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSomewhatRamblingReviewer/pseuds/TheSomewhatRamblingReviewer
Summary: Warning: Contains spoilers for the episode and rest of the series. Complete.





	Teen Wolf, Season 3, Episode 6, Motel California

Open to March 5, 1977. A bleeding Alexander Argent is checking into a motel.

Inside the room, it’s revealed he has a werewolf bite. Speaking French, he kills himself via shotgun loaded with a wolfsbane bullet.

There’s a transition to the school bus pulling into the same motel. There’s a continuity goof where the bus stops, the doors open, and Scott and Stiles step out to where everyone else is already outside.

Giving everyone keys to their rooms, Coach warns them not to be up to their deviant sexual ways.

Normally, I’d go on about how badly Coach is handling this, but actually, he’s not.

If the students were supposed to stay overnight at wherever the meet is, then, the school should have sent, at least, a female teacher to go along with Coach and, potentially, some more teachers and maybe some parent chaperones. If this is the case and the school didn’t, this is on the school, not Coach.

So, assuming either it wasn’t supposed to be an overnight thing or the school is just continuing to be a massive lawsuit looking for a place to happen, Coach is left as the only adult in charge of a group of teenagers. Now, I fully believe, if someone claimed assault or worse, he’d be ruthless in protecting them, but I don’t particularly blaming him for going, ‘These are good kids. I’m not going to stay up doing routine checks to make sure everyone is staying in their assigned room with their assigned partner with everyone on their own bed. Let’s face it, they’d probably still find a way around it, and I’d get little sleep for my trouble. So, if the kids use this as an opportunity for some hanky-panky, at least, there’s a chance most of the kids will be staying safely in their rooms. Hopefully, they’ll be smart about protection and keep the noise level down.’

Lydia expresses her reservations about the motel to Allison.

In their room, Scott and Stiles are discussing Stiles’s suspects. Originally, he had ten, although, technically, it was just nine due to him counting Derek twice. Heh.

I’m not calling unreliable narration. Scott doesn’t like or trust Derek, but Stiles is still at a point where Derek is only occasionally an ally. It’s easier for him to fall into his normal badmouthing of Derek with Scott than do any reflection on how his summer of working with Derek has been subtly shifting his feelings.

He’s down to four, now:

Harris. He’s missing, but he hasn’t been found dead. This launches Stiles into a mini-rant about no one listening when he suspected Matt of being a killer.

Cora. No one knows anything about her, and she’s Derek’s sister. Heh.

Deaton. His Obi-wan shtick irritates Stiles, and so does the fact Scott has yet to see Star Wars.

Finally, there’s Lydia. Despite his reluctance, he feels the need to due to her past possession.

Meanwhile, Jennifer has taken Derek into the loft. She freaks out about how she should take him to a hospital. Derek insists on no hospital, and when they get to the bed, her strength finally gives out.

I’m not sure the Jennifer/Derek parts of this episode happened or not. I do believe Jennifer mind-whammied Derek into having sex with her and played with his feelings, but I’m not sure Scott ever realises she did this. All he knows is they had sex/a brief relationship. Therefore, he could be filling a lot of things in.

I acknowledge it could just be my hatred of that frelling boiler room, but I’m still not sure her almost being attacked by Cora and Boyd, and then, out of the four other options everyone had, the fifth option of sending blood-covered Derek, of all people, to check on her happened.

At the abandoned warehouse, Chris is examining the battlefield. He sees mental images of what happened in his head. I’m guessing this is just his imagination, but with some of the precognitive abilities Allison exhibits, there’s a possibility it’s more.

Back at the motel, Scott sees his eye turn red in the mirror.

Meanwhile, Stiles goes to get a snack from the vending machine. Boyd is there, and utterly ignoring him, Boyd’s response to the machine stealing his snack is to punch through the glass.

After Boyd leaves with his snack in tow, Stiles casually steals some for himself.

Inside, Allison is taking a shower, and Scott appears. He’s creepy, but thankfully, he leaves without incident.

In the lobby, Lydia talks to the hair-raising motel owner. She’s a smoker, and she gleefully tells Lydia about how the motel has the most suicides in the state of California.

This lady is so spine chilling I’m surprised she wasn’t eventually revealed to be part of the evil going on. Although, the option to bring her back was firmly open if the writers ever decided to.

Meanwhile, Isaac is mindlessly trying to find a non-static channel. A disturbing smile appears on his face.

In the next scene, Chris and Allison talk via phone, and on a podcast, someone pointed out it’s apparently day where he is and night over at the motel. Mirrorverse? He’s willing to drive over to pick her and Lydia up, but she assures him they’re fine. He tells her she can tell him anything, and she says she knows.

Of course, they’re both keeping secrets from one another. Until he makes the first move, she’s not willingly going to make hers.

At the loft, Jennifer babbles about Derek’s physique and the fact he’s bleeding black blood. He loses consciousness. Understandably, this doesn’t help her near hysteria. However, after checking his heartbeat, she lets out a sound of drained relief when she hears it beating steadily.

Back at the motel, Allison and Lydia are talking about the suicides when Lydia hears something. At first, I thought she was having an auditory psychic flashback of the twins deciding which would get her and which would get Danny, but instead, it’s a man and woman discussing their suicide pact.

I wish it had been the former.

Assuming it was Lydia and another girl, then, would Ethan have tried to seduce one of them regardless of his orientation, or would he have found another to try to keep a watch on her? Did the twins immediately assume/agree Aiden would take Lydia and Ethan would take Danny based on their orientations, or was there a conversation of, maybe romance isn’t the best option since there’s a potential they might actually fall for our targets, and therefore, Ethan should try to befriend Lydia and Aiden should try to befriend Danny?

Whether it’s just the twins or the twins plus the other alphas, these type of conversations could have really helped expand everyone’s characterisation, and having them revealed to Lydia by the other big bad of 3A during an episode full of psychic hijinks would have fit nicely into said episode.

Lydia rushes off, and Allison follows. They discover an empty room undergoing renovation. Being a good friend, Allison assures Lydia, after everything they’ve been through, she believes her.

Elsewhere, Boyd is getting ice when he has a memory of his younger sister either disappearing or dying when he was supposed to be watching her during a skating outing. He has a hallucination of her body in the ice machine.

I know Golightly likely wasn’t available, but having Erica appear would have been awesome, too. I’m not sure if the addition of Alicia was always planned. If this episode was conceived with the belief Erica would still be around, it may or may not have made sense for her to be a hallucination. It would have been awesome for him to talk to her after this episode, though, about his missing/dead sister.

Meanwhile, Lydia is insisting they leave, and Allison is trying to reassure her.

I’m actually surprised Victoria’s suicide never came up during this episode.

In his room, Isaac wakes up, and he has an auditory memory of helping a yelling Coach Lahey with the fridge. It’s implied to be the first time Isaac was locked inside it.

In the lobby, Allison and Lydia discover the number detailing the suicides has gone up by three, and interestingly, the creepy woman isn’t around. Was she real? A hallucination? A malevolent spirit? A neutral spirit? An evil human? A regular human who’s gone to bed/on another smoke break? Did Coach interact with her? Did anyone but Lydia?

The next scene has Scott having a hallucination of Melissa calling him. She’s killed by Deucalion in front of him. Stiles appears, but before he can realise anything is wrong, he leaves after getting a text from Lydia.

In a nice character scene for Ethan and Danny and the Dethan ship, they’re are getting hot and heavy in their room. Ethan discovers two scars on Danny’s torso. It’s not said what he has, but he explains he’s had surgery in the past. Two bars were put in when he was 14 in order to keep his lungs and heart from being crushed.

Aside from being a cool insight into Danny, I’ve touched on this before, but this might explain why Stiles likes both Danny and Boyd so much.

Stiles’s mother suffered and died. Danny suffered. Boyd lost his little sister, and even if she’s somehow still alive, he still constantly has to deal with her loss.

Ethan asks how Danny would feel about not needing them, and Danny answers he wouldn’t want to be rid of them. He declares they make him feel like a survivor. In a creepy tone, Ethan comments, “I really hope you are.”

There’s some more snogging, and then, Ethan starts having transformation issues. I thought he was going to bite Danny here, but he doesn’t. Rushing to the bathroom, he sees a face trying to escape from his stomach. Ignoring Danny’s confusion and concern, he quickly leaves both the bathroom and the room.

Meanwhile, the human trio are talking about the odd behaviour of the werewolves. They realise said werewolves could be the next sacrifices. When they go to get Isaac, Scott, and Boyd, they hear a handsaw in the room Allison and Lydia checked out earlier. Managing to get in, they find Ethan about to kill himself via handsaw.

Despite the fact Ethan has hurt several of them, the trio immediately springs into action to try to save him. Awesome.

During the struggle, he ends up touching a heater, and this brings him out of it.

At the loft, Derek regains consciousness. He says the others think he’s dead, and he has to find them. Jennifer suggests this is a good thing.

The writers and Haley Webb did an excellent job with these scenes. There’s ambiguity, but none of Jennifer’s reactions explicitly point to her being anything than a normal human with no supernatural ulterior motives.

Going by the above assumption, Derek saved her life. She may not know what exactly he is, but she knows he’s not exactly human. He came to her badly wounded.

She has no idea what’s after him. She has no idea who or what the people he wants to contact are. It’s reasonable to assume she can’t protect him against whatever he couldn’t protect himself against. She doesn’t know if the people he wants to contact can be trusted, and she doesn’t know if they’d be able to protect him.

In her mind, his best hope, and possibly her best hope, is to minimise the chances of the people who wounded him finding out he’s still alive as much as possible, even if doing so means putting others in danger. She has the right to look out for herself, and it doesn’t say anything horrible about her character she’d place herself and the person she knows, the person she owes her life to, over these people she knows jack about.

Of course, she ruins things by bringing up Romeo and Juliet.

Back at the motel, Ethan is uncooperative of the trio’s attempts to find out what just happened with him. When Stiles points out they just saved his life, his response is, “And you probably shouldn’t have,” before leaving.

Allison tells Stiles and Lydia to find Isaac and Boyd. She’ll find Scott. After she goes, Lydia prods Stiles into telling her what’s on his mind. It comes out he thinks she might be unintentionally responsible for all this like she was when Peter possessed her.

Meanwhile, Boyd is having more hallucinations.

Back at the loft, Jennifer has been unable to find any first-aid stuff. She asks how they fix Derek up. He answers he needs time. Pointing out she doesn’t know him, he says she should leave.

Her answer is to suggest she has a feeling about him.

“It shouldn’t be a good one. Everyone around me- everyone gets hurt.”

“I’ve been hurt before,” she answers.

They kiss.

At the motel, Boyd is walking around barefoot, and he finds a safe in the lobby.

Allison looks for Scott.

Stiles tries to apologise to Lydia, but she has an auditory hallucination of a woman drowning her baby.

I’m not sure I believe Claudia tried to drown Stiles, but I’ve always felt she knew more than Sheriff S did about certain things.

Boyd is using the safe to drown himself in the bathtub.

Appearing, Lydia and Stiles realise they can’t drain the water or move the safe. Lydia has an idea to use an emergency flare from the bus due to the fact they burn underwater.

As someone else noticed, Boyd’s feet are sticking out of the tub. They could easily apply heat to the soles of his feet.

When Stiles leaves to get the flare, Lydia finds a sobbing Isaac curled up underneath the bed.

It’s disturbing, eerie, and heart breaking. Everyone involved in the making of the scene deserves credit for how effective this moment was.

After Boyd and Isaac have been deprogrammed, the human trio reunites outside. I assume Isaac and Boyd stayed behind to pack. Allison announces she can’t find Scott, and they decide to go the bus to get another flare.

When they get there, they find Scott has soaked himself in gasoline. He has a flare in his hands.

He says there’s no hope for him or Derek, and there are intercutting shots of Derek and Jennifer kissing with Derek healing.

Carefully walking over, Stiles sobbingly tells Scott, “Scott, just listen to me, okay? You’re not no one. Okay? You’re someone. You’re- Scott, you’re my best friend. Okay, and I need you. Sc-Scott, you’re my brother. Alright, so,” he steps into the puddle of gasoline. Placing his hand on the flare, he says, “I think you’re just going to have to take me with you.”

Managing to extract the flair, he throws it away. Lydia sees it rolling towards the puddle, and she runs to push Stiles out. Latching onto Scott, Stiles pushes him out.

In the flames, Lydia sees a disfigured Jennifer.

Did Jennifer temporarily leave the loft via the currents? Is this a mental projection? Or again, were she and Derek even at the loft during this episode?

The next day, Coach finds the team of six sleeping on the bus. Despite the fact they’re all dressed and only two of them (Lydia and Allison) are sitting beside one another, he seems to think they were up to some form of sexual deviancy. He announces the meet has been cancelled.

Coach knows about the supernatural. He often knows more about what’s going on with the teenagers than they realise. Did he not realise there was something going on during this episode, or is he just deflecting with his usual kookiness?

Others start to appear, and Ethan sits down next to Scott. Ignoring Stiles’s correct assertion he, rather than Scott, saved Ethan, Ethan tells Scott the alphas think Derek is alive. They’re either going to kill him or force him to join their pack.

This isn’t different from what they’ve already tried to do. However, the useful information Ethan is actually giving is establishing himself as a potential future ally.

He goes to the back, and Lydia notices something about Coach’s whistle. She plucks it from him, and not knowing how to deal with the girl who once ran around naked and isn’t even supposed to be here on this trip but whose safety and well-being are his responsibility, he simply tells her he’s going to need it back.

Tough luck, though. She shows Scott and Stiles the whistle has been coated with wolfsbane, and Stiles quickly throws it out of the window.

The bus leaves, and there’s a shot of the whistle lying on the ground.

Elsewhere, Chris goes into a room containing a wheelchair-bound Gerard. He asks about his uncle who killed himself.

Assuming this happened, Gerard lies about Deucalion biting Alexander.

I believe the flashbacks involving Gerard and Deucalion in Visionary are accurate, though, if they match what Gerard tells Allison and Scott is debatable. No one ever mentions Alexander. Deucalion was a rational, compassionate person back then, and he never showed any sign of believing he and Gerard couldn’t work out a peace treaty, because, he never did anything a non-evil rational person might consider a deal-breaker such as biting one of their relatives.

Someone bit Alexander, and it was likely non-consensual. This might have been what irrevocably put Gerard on the dark side. But either he’s mistaken or lying about it being Deucalion, and with Gerard, I always assume he’s lying.

Interestingly, unless the creepy Scott scene was a hallucination, Allison wasn’t haunted during this episode. It could have been only the werewolves were targeted, or it could have been, Stiles being something protected him. Allison took a shower, water is bad in TW, and aside from the interaction with Scott, nothing happened to her.

Is there a possibility Alexander was looking out for his blood?

Fin.


End file.
